[BL] Linux without a hard drive, was Re: MPlayer

sindi keesan keesan at sdf.lonestar.org
Wed Jun 29 10:11:24 EDT 2005


On Wed, 29 Jun 2005, James Miller wrote:

> On Wed, 29 Jun 2005, Theo Perry wrote:
>
>> I think you have to type "sudo su" to work as root in DSL.
>
> That's right. It works just like Knoppix in this respect. But you don't
> necessarily have to "be" root to issue root commands when using sudo. To
> issue any command requiring rot priviledges such as insmod (actually, on a
> more modern distro like DSL you'd want to use modprobe) in DSL, just issue
> sudo insmod module_name. Or, better yet sudo modprobe module_name. Sudo
> usually prompts for password, but these live CD distros are set up to sudo
> passwordless.

Thanks.  I was reading about sudo.  Another approach is to type sudo -v, 
then give your password which will be valid for 5 minutes, then sudo su -, 
which gives you the root path, then you can type commands for 5 minutes 
without typing sudo each time.

DSL apparently would not need the sudo -v part, would it need sudo su -?

I was going to try this but the dratted computer is back to 101 i/o rom 
error and probably needs a $20 voltage board replacement.

The 0x10 error I was getting trying to boot from 2-floppy BL3 is 
supposedly due to 'bad media' - so I tried another BL3 set but by then 
could not boot.

The boot process stopping between the popad bug OK line and the POSIX 
conformance testing line while trying to boot the parport zip boot disk, 
with 386 BL3 kernel, is the same as what I was getting trying to boot with 
the 486 kernel on a 486 or pentium.  The 486 kernel was supposedly buggy, 
but this 386 kernel worked on all my other computers for booting that 
parport zip boot disk.  Odd.  Maybe I should try the pentium kernel here.

If we can fix the hardware boot problem, this really does seem like a good 
candidate for burning BL2 and/or BL3 to a bootable CD rather than going 
through all the sudos and insmods and chroots and THEN waiting several 
minutes for BL3 and then mplayer to load from zip disk.

DSL seems to already set up sound.  Maybe it has a movie player?  Ubuntu 
has some sort of movie player (which is used as a jpeg viewer) but is 
ridiculously slow to load, looking for new hardware, networks, etc.
It should at least be happy with 320MB RAM.

If I ever get this figured out, maybe I could post an iso file for a 
minimal BL3 with mplayer and sb16 sound.  (Except that it is laptops that 
seem to be missing floppy or hard drives, and in my experience they have 
more obscure sound chips that might need ALSA sound).  Can you make a 
256MB RAMdisk for use with BL2, with a slightly modified kernel (this 
one does 4MB RAMdisks) like DSL does?

>
> James
> _______________________________________________
> BasLinux mailing list
> BasLinux at lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/baslinux
>

keesan at sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org



More information about the BasLinux mailing list